Sparland man faces up to 30 years for filming girls taking showers

PEORIA — A Sparland man faces up to 30 years in prison after his conviction Tuesday in federal court of making child porn by filming teenage girls taking showers at his home.

After a two-day bench trial, Chief U.S. District Judge James Shadid found Brian A. Miller, 36, guilty of 22 counts of knowingly using and attempting to use a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of such conduct.

Defense attorney Joel Brown conceded that Miller filmed the five girls at various times between the summer of 2011 and May 2012. But Brown told Shadid that while inappropriate, it wasn’t child porn.

“If I was a dad, do I want to punch him? Absolutely. Is what he did creepy? Yes. But is nudity pornography? No,” he said during closing arguments.

Brown said the 25 videos taken of the girls, then ages 13 to 16, didn’t fit within the federal definition of child porn. And as such, his client should have been charged in Marshall County Circuit Court with a more appropriate charge that dealt with unauthorized recording, not child porn.

But Timothy Bass, the federal prosecutor in the case, pushed back, saying that if taking pictures of girls with a cellphone through an 1/8-inch peep hole carved out in drywall and a mirror wasn’t done for the purpose of sexual gratification, then what was? The prosecutor argued, and Shadid agreed, that Miller’s actions showed great effort to capture the girls on film.

Bass contended that Miller “lured” the girls, all friends of the family, to the bathroom so he could videotape them.

According to trial testimony, authorities learned about the videotaping last summer from a relative of Miller who had seen the movie files on his laptop. The relative recognized the shower as an area in Miller’s home. The relative then found a hole in the drywall that looked through the back of a mirror. The complaint states the silver coating had been scraped off the mirror, allowing a person to see through it into the shower.

Andy Kravetz can be reached at 686-3283 or akravetz@pjstar.com. Follow him on Twitter @andykravetz.